“Let’s be honest, Fed independence is a myth.”

So said some guy in the sales department (as distinct from the research division) at JPMorgan, in a note to clients this week.

Another guy at JPMorgan who, by implication, isn’t being “honest,” doesn’t necessarily agree. Earlier this week, that guy said, “the independence of the Fed is absolutely critical.”

The first guy you’ve probably never heard of. His name’s Ilan. The second guy’s Jamie Dimon. Who you gonna believe, right?

I’m being sarcastic. Both Ilan (whoever he is) and Jamie (the preeminent American banker of the modern era) are correct. Fed independence is a myth, but it’s all the same mission critical.

Removing the Fed Chair, as Donald Trump may or may not do in the coming days or weeks, is a slippery slope. Far be it from me to play down the potentially dire consequences of a pliant Fed Chair, but if the only goal was to replace Powell with, say, Chris Waller or some other mostly inoffensive candidate whose only “sin” is being willing to work for Trump, this probably wouldn’t be something worth getting too bent out of shape over beyond fretting about a potentially destabilizing, breakevens-led bear steepener in the Treasury curve.

But I don’t think it’s safe to assume Trump intends to stop with Powell, nor does anyone I know think Waller (or anyone like Waller) is the frontrunner for the chairmanship. Kevin Warsh might’ve been ok, but his remarks across a succession of Fox interviews over the last week give me pause, particularly given his history as a hawk. The other Kevin — Hassett — is a sycophant, plain and simple. Do note: “Fed Chair Hassett” was a running joke during Trump’s first term, like “Treasury Secretary Larry Kudlow.” It was something you said when you wanted to caricature the myriad absurdities of the administration. Now, “Fed Chair Hassett” is a prospective reality.

If the Fed becomes merely an extension of Trump that sets rates according mostly to his whims and only leans hawkish in the most dire circumstances and/or when the bond and currency markets demand it at figurative gunpoint, then the Fed becomes CBT. That’s a real possibility, and it’s an existential risk. Because unlike the lira, the dollar’s the linchpin for the global financial system.

Due to the dollar’s unique status, the Fed’s functionally “the world’s central bank.” In a scenario where Trump’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan vis-à-vis the Fed rather than Richard Nixon or, to use ol’ Ilan’s example from the above-mentioned JPMorgan trading note, Lyndon Johnson, then we (all of us, everywhere, globally) have a problem, and not a small one either.

As someone who knows as much about the history of the Fed as the next guy whose “business” is macro and far more about Erdogan’s relationship with CBT than the vast majority of ostensible market mavens, let me just say that Trump’s rhetoric about the central bank — or at least his public rhetoric and penchant for employing thinly-veiled threats which, to some observers anyway, may sound like allusions to physical coercion — is very much akin to Erdogan’s.

Whatever you want to say about the independence of the Fed — i.e., whether you want to deride it as a myth or not — it’s an institution that enjoys as much autonomy as you can reasonably expect from an arm of the federal government. If you want to argue that’s a low bar — that no government institution is independent of the government, pretty much by definition — I’ll be the first to agree. And I guarantee I’ve called Fed independence a “myth” more times over the past decade than any Wall Street derivatives salesman.

So, I get it. God knows I do. It’s what other people don’t get that concerns me. We’ve learned these past nine years that America’s vaunted checks and balances are paper tigers. There’s no teeth there at all. They’re “a myth,” if you like. People like Ilan are at risk of being blindsided in a scenario where Trump moves to realize his autocratic fantasies, which in this case would mean overhauling the Fed Board to look like his reconstituted Kennedy Center committee, which includes Pam Bondi, Susie Wiles, Fox’s Maria Bartiromo and Laura Ingraham and, naturally, Lee Greenwood.

If you think that’s absurd, note that anyone would’ve said the same thing about the Kennedy Center. If you think it’s “not permitted under the law,” recall that Powell said the same thing about Trump’s capacity to remove a Fed Chair a mere eight months ago.